The 20th century was horrible for the Everglades. The broad shallow river, one of the most unique ecosystems on the planet, was labeled wasteland and ruthlessly dammed, carved into parcels, dried out and diverted into near oblivion.

But at the end of the century, 25 years ago this month, Democrats and Republicans from Florida and Washington, D.C., joined forces and signed the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan into law.

The ambitious 68-project plan was supposed to cost $7.8 billion, it was supposed to take 30 years to complete and it was supposed to save what was left of the Everglades.

That’s not how things have played out, at least not yet. Two of those three expectations have been vastly overshot — costs have tripled to $23 billion and it could take another 20 years to complete.

Experts say restoration success hinges on two things: The engineering has to work and the people of Florida have to be willing to pay for the job to be finished.

But where do we stand 25 years in? After decades of funding delays, after heated controversies over reservoir size, after “lost summers” due to toxic blue-green algae, the pace of construction has finally quickened. The “crown jewel” of restoration — the Everglades Agricultural Area Reservoir — is finally under construction. More water is flowing under Tamiami Trail and into Everglades National Park.

Shannon Estenoz is the chief policy officer of The Everglades Foundation, a nonprofit focused on science and policy around the restoration plan. To use a sports metaphor about the restoration, she said, “I would say we are in the fourth quarter of the restoration program, and we’re ahead, we’re winning. But the game is still losable, we could still blow it. … We, the people, could get this wrong. So we’ve got to keep our heads in the game and stay focused.”

In a nutshell, the restoration plan looks to reverse the mistakes of the 20th century.

The Everglades once flowed 220 miles from south of Orlando to Lake Okeechobee, down through what is now the Everglades Agricultural Area, the Miccosukee Reservation and into Everglades National Park. The river terminated through vast mangrove-lined estuaries in Florida Bay and the Gulf.

But the modern world envisioned a dry farmable Everglades.

During the 20th century, the river was dammed and cut into boxes. Some became suburbia, some became farmland. Remaining wild areas were often parched, or in some cases, such as along Tamiami Trail, where the Miccosukee Reservation sits, flooded.

Florida Bay grew too salty without enough fresh water, and during wet years, as of 2025, half of the original Everglades has been destroyed.

The restoration plan has moved at a maddeningly slow pace for some, especially during weather extremes.

During dry years, Florida Bay has become so salty and hot that seagrass die-offs fuel algae blooms that in turn fueled more seagrass die-offs. Recovery takes decades. During wet years, such as 2016, canals shunted highly polluted Lake Okeechobee water east and west to estuaries near Stuart and Fort Myers, decimating those ecosystems and prompting “lost summers” of economic damage.

“You know, we were slow in getting out of the box,” said Steve Davis, The Everglades Foundation’s chief science officer, referencing the cumbersome process of planning and navigating funding cycles in Congress. “But now we’re kind of hitting all of those key metrics in terms of having projects planned, having them authorized, having the money to now construct and even accelerate something like the (Everglades Agricultural Area) Reservoir.”

The pace of groundbreaking, construction and completion of pivotal projects has undeniably accelerated in the last few years.

In July of this year, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the agency overseeing the restoration, agreed to allow the state to take the lead in construction on key projects, including the reservoir, which is now projected to be done by 2029 instead of 2034.

Since 2023, the Army Corps and South Florida Water Management District, which also oversees the plan, have made many gains, including:

— Completing the C-43 impoundment, which stores water off of Lake Okeechobee and doles it out into the Caloosahatchee estuary at a slower, eco-friendly pace, helping fish and oysters thrive.

— Breaking ground on the pivotal EAA Reservoir, which will store Lake Okeechobee discharges before the water flows into filtration marshes and eventually south to Florida Bay. It will also help the Army Corps reduce polluted Lake Okeechobee discharges to delicate estuaries near Stuart and Fort Myers.

— Breaking ground on the Blue Shanty Flow Way, which will move more fresh water under the Tamiami Trail and into Florida Bay. This will also lower water levels in the Miccosukee Reservation, where water is often too high for too long, damaging the ecosystem.

— Completing the Biscayne Bay Coastal Wetlands Project, which filters suburban canal water through a restored wetland before it disperses more naturally into Biscayne National Park, where it helps seagrass and marine wildlife thrive.

— Additionally, the Army Corps and water management district have completed three miles of bridging along Tamiami Trail, which previously acted as a dam.

When will it all be done? Col. Brandon Bowman of the Army Corps said it will be “a couple decades” before every last one of the 68 infrastructure projects is finished.

Concerns linger, particularly with the ability to store and clear water.

“Yes, we’re 25 years into CERP (the restoration plan),” said Eve Samples, spokesperson for Friends of the Everglades, an environmental nonprofit. “But we still haven’t finished the job in terms of land acquisition.”

The lynchpin of restoration

Though breaking ground on the reservoir and accelerating its schedule has been cause for celebration, it has been the most contentious project on the restoration plan. Critics say its current footprint and functionality is insufficient.

Optimists in the early 2000s envisioned a shallow, 60,000-acre wildlife-friendly reservoir south of Lake Okeechobee that would have required the sugar industry to sell a significant amount of land.

The dream almost came true.

Gov. Charlie Crist cut a deal in 2008 with a company called U.S. Sugar to buy all the company’s EAA land — 187,000 acres — and convert some of it into the EAA Reservoir and filtration marshes.

Then the Great Recession hit and the state lacked the funds to buy the land. When Gov. Rick Scott was elected in 2010 he had the option to buy most of the land, but he chose not to. It was expensive, $1.34 billion, and when sugar prices rose, the industry, which had contributed handsomely to Scott’s Let’s Get to Work political committee, became reluctant to part ways with the land.

Scott would go on to cut state budgets devoted to land acquisition. It would be another nine years before the state signed a law funding a restoration reservoir in 2017, but the project would be limited to land the state already owned.

The project broke ground in 2023.

Once completed, the reservoir will be a 10,500-acre, 23-foot-deep, tub-shaped impoundment with 37-foot-tall banks. Its total capacity will be about two-thirds of the original plan.

There will be another 6,500 acres of critical filtration marsh, known as stormwater treatment areas to go with it.

Critics say it’s not enough.

Scientists at Friends of the Everglades believe the system needs another 100,000 acres of water storage and cleaning south of Lake Okeechobee. That would require the state to purchase more land in the EAA.

“That (100,000 acres) sounds like a daunting number until you remember that we do have voter-approved land acquisition money from the state of Florida,” said Samples.

In 2014, Florida voters overwhelmingly approved Amendment 1 , which appropriated tax revenue to land acquisition for the purposes of conservation. Conservation groups have sued the state Legislature over how the money should be spent.

Samples has concerns about the sugar industry selling their farmland to mines or housing developers.

“There’s still about 400,000 acres of sugar cane in the Everglades Agricultural Area, and we know that the industry is looking at other uses for that land because it has proposed a rock mine, for example, and there have been other development proposals in the EAA,” she said.

Samples said that changes in use would require government approval from Palm Beach County. “There are some forks in the road,” she said, “that are critical to the future health, not just to the Everglades, but to all of South Florida — our water supply, our ecology, our clean water-based tourism economy.”

Clean water worries

The size of the reservoir is not the only concern. By law, the water flowing into the Everglades must be clean.

Water from Lake Okeechobee and the EAA is laced with the fertilizer phosphorus, which wreaks havoc in the Everglades by spiking the growth of plants that don’t belong there, choking out the foundation of the whole system.

Stormwater treatment areas, known as STAs — managed marshes that filter the phosphorus — are seen by many to be the weak link in the restoration chain.

Their current setup has no redundancy, and sometimes they must be shut down. It’s illegal to send polluted water south, so the flow stops.

“They’re kind of unpredictable biological systems and unpredictable from the standpoint that we don’t know how much rain is going to come, when it’s going to come,” said Davis of The Everglades Foundation. “We don’t know when the hurricanes are going to come. They have an impact on STAs. … What we’ve seen is that we really have no redundancy in that infrastructure.”

A new STA is being built next to the EAA Reservoir, but it will only be able to handle about half of the reservoir’s annual outflow.

The rest will have to go to STAs that already get agriculture runoff. The lack of redundancy concerns both Davis and Samples.

“There is no Everglades restoration unless the water is clean,” said Samples, “and we can’t clean adequate volumes of water unless more land is acquired in the EAA,” said Samples.

Bowman is more confident.

He says the water management district has become quite good at managing the STAs.

“So from what we’re seeing, the science is kind of getting dialed in, as long as they stay hydrated. I think they (the STAs) are going to do what they’re needed to do.”

The Miccosukee flooding

Other issues persist. The Everglades are currently boxed off into massive swaths of land, some dotted beautifully with tree islands and a landscape much as it’s been for 5,000 years, some bereft of water flow and thus flattened into homogeneous plains of sawgrass that don’t support as much life, some of it too wet.

The Miccosukee Reservation sits at the south end of a series of levees that funnel water onto it. and the Tamiami Trail is not yet porous enough to allow that water to pass south quickly.

During wet years, the reservation ends up being too wet for too long, driving out wildlife and damaging plant life.

Construction on the Blue Shanty Flow Way, which helps move more water through the Tamiami Trail, also has been accelerated to line up with the reservoir’s completion.

Bowman said in addition to Blue Shanty and the three miles of bridging that already exists on the Tamiami Trail, the Army Corps is cutting culverts into several of the levees and canals that cause high water on the the reservation.

The culverts will allow Everglades flow to spread out more naturally in an east-west direction instead of hemming it in.

Pending risks

There are ecological concerns to the restoration’s success, but there are also political and social ones.

Davis said one of the threats to restoration at this juncture is complacency. “The risk is just thinking that, you know, we’ve got enough momentum to get us across the finish line. We don’t.”

Bowman of the Army Corps said that the pace of restoration is tied to funding from both the state and federal government, and that money hinges on public opinion. Completion is going to be based on funds availability — you know, how much willpower folks push on Congress and on Tallahassee to keep on funding it.”

Another long-term concern for environmental nonprofits, such as Friends of the Everglades, is what will happen if the Everglades Agricultural area, much of which sits in Palm Beach County, is developed into housing.

What will success look like?

Estenoz said the best way to measure success is to look at the ecological response — “when we stop depriving Florida Bay of fresh water, can seagrass recover?”

Wading bird nesting activity is one indicator.

Mark Cook, an avian biologist with the South Florida Water Management District, found in 2018 that nesting activity in South Florida was way up, particularly in the Everglades system, even reaching levels similar to the 1930s, but they’ve fluctuated since.

Even the topography can change relatively quickly, though.

Davis said that within five or 10 years of flow restoration, areas that are less than ideal — flat homogeneous sawgrass with no topography — can form sloughs of deeper water where fish can survive dry season and humps of dry land that wildlife such as bobcats to wading birds can exploit all year.

As far as estuary wildlife that should flourish as restoration kicks in, Davis is keen on a few indicator species — pink shrimp, juvenile crocodiles and spotted sea trout — which are all uniquely sensitive to Florida Bay salinity. “If we’re getting more flows south, we’re seeing improved conditions for those indicator species.”

He said the same will hold true for oysters and seagrass in the Caloosahatchee River and the St. Lucie River estuaries once massive freshwater pulses from Lake Okeechobee stop.

As large as those ecosystems are, Davis’ key vision for the restoration’s future is tiny, and tied to a memory from the past.

He started exploring the coastal Everglades in 1995 and witnessed dense lush seagrass beds beyond what he’d ever imagined.

“You’d have seagrasses that are so productive that they’re just producing excess oxygen — it looks like Champagne bubbles coming off of these blades, floating up to the surface. It was just phenomenal to see.”

Bill Kearney covers the environment, the outdoors and tropical weather. He can be reached at bkearney@sunsentinel.com. Follow him on Instagram @billkearney or on X @billkearney6.